Menu

NJ Brownies Support Transgender Girl Scout in Wake of Cookie Boycott

Watch their you-tube video:When my seven-year-old daughter Emma told me last September that she wanted to be a Brownie (the younger troop in Girl Scouts), I was apprehensive at best. As a kid, being a girl scout was the last thing I had ever wanted mostly because I couldn’t fathom wearing the dress, and as an adult, I want to raise a kid who is progressive and feminist and not stuck in the 1950s (which was the assumption I made about the Girl Scouts). But Emma wanted to do it, and so after making sure they don’t have the same homophobic policies as the Boy Scouts (which they don’t) I gritted my teeth and said, “yes, honey, of course you can join.”

It helped me that around the same time conservatives were flyering the internet, warning parents that the Girl Scouts are pro-lesbian, pro-feminist and pro-choice. I thought “well, I can only hope.” That said, I couldn’t have foreseen that joining the Brownies would be such a rich opportunity for Emma and a couple of her friends from the troop to show support for a transgender girl named Bobby Montoya who is a Girl Scout in Colorado. This was a story that Emma could relate to – a little girl who wanted to be a Girl Scout – and therefore was the perfect example to teach her about being an ally and accepting people for who they are and who they say they are.

By now, many of you are probably aware of the controversy that has been sparked by the decision of the Colorado Girl Scouts to include a seven year-old transgender girl named Bobby Montoya in one of their local troops. After initially denying her enrollment, the Girl Scouts of Colorado flipped their decision, making an official statement that “if a child identifies as a girl and the child’s family presents her as a girl, Girl Scouts of Colorado welcomes her as a Girl Scout.”

Consequently, there has been cookie backlash! A 14-year-old called Taylor published a video on you-tube (which has since been made private after the teen was threatened) called for a boycott of girl scout cookies to protest the decision to allow Bobby into the Girl Scouts. In Louisiana, several parents have pulled their girls from Girl Scouts because of the Colorado decision (which, by the way, is a state policy that doesn’t have anything to do with Louisiana Girl Scouts) and started their own, I can only assume transphobic, HonestGirlScouts.com.

When I told Emma what was happening, we talked about making a video to support Bobby and she wanted to invite her troop members to participate with her. Many parents elected not to have their daughters participate – even if they supported inclusion of transgender girls for reasons I plan to address in another post.

Here is the video that Emma and her fellow Brownies Courtney and Emmy made in their support for Bobby. And just so you know, these are the kids’ words. They wrote it themselves, and they read aloud the Girl Scout Law to remind people what the Girl Scouts are really about. I’m obviously more than just a little proud, and actually I’ve discovered that Brownies are pretty cool as well.